Part 12

“No; uterine operations are easy and simple. It is simply because the sore on the face is obvious, plain, unmistakable evidence of something wrong; and the patient ordinarily gets into the surgeon’s hands early; that is, before the roots of the growth have spread and involved life itself. The difference in mortality between carcinoma of the lip and carcinoma of the womb is the difference between early operation and delayed operation. If uterine cancer or breast cancer were discovered as early as lip cancer, we’d save practically as many of the internal as we do of the external cases. And if all the lip cancer cases were noticed at the first development, we’d save ninety-five per cent of them.”

“Isn’t it the business of the physician to find out about the internal forms?” asked Mrs. Sharpless.

“Often the physician hasn’t the chance. The woman ought to do the first diagnosing herself. That is, she must be taught to recognize suspicious symptoms. In Germany there has been a campaign of education among women on cancer of the womb. The result is that more than twice as many Germans come to the operating table, in time to give a fair chance of permanent recovery in this class of cases, as do Americans.”

“How is the American woman, who knows nothing about such matters, to find out?” queried the minister’s wife.

“There is a campaign of education now under way here. Publications giving the basic facts about cancer, its prevention and cure, in simple and popular form, can be had from the American Society for the Control of Cancer,—Thomas M. Debevoise, secretary, 62 Cedar Street, New York City; or more detailed advice can be had from the Cancer Campaign Committee of the Congress of Surgeons of North America, Dr. Thomas S. Cullen, chairman, 3 West Preston Street, Baltimore; or from Dr. F. R. Green, 535 Dearborn Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, secretary of the Council of Health and Public Instruction of the American Medical Association.”

“Why not more easily and readily one’s own physician?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“Women don’t go to their own physicians early enough. It is necessary that they be trained to understand symptoms which do not at first seem serious enough for medical attention. Besides, I regret to confess, in this matter of cancer our physicians need educating, too. They are too prone to say, if they are not sure of the diagnosis, ‘Wait and see.’ Waiting to see is what kills three fourths of the women who succumb to cancer. Let me illustrate this peril by two cases which have come under my observation: The wife of a lawyer in a Western city had a severe attack of stomach trouble. Her doctor, a young and open-minded man, had the courage to say, ‘I don’t know. But I’m afraid it’s cancer. You’d better go to such-and-such a hospital and let them see.’ The woman went. An exploratory incision was made and carcinoma found in the early stage. It was cut out and to-day she is as good as new.

“Now, this same lawyer had a friend who had been treated for months by a stomach specialist of some reputation. Under the treatment he had grown steadily thinner, paler, and weaker. ‘Indigestion, gastric intoxication,’ the specialist repeated, parrotlike, until the man himself, in his misery, began to suspect. At this point the lawyer friend got hold of him and took him to the hospital where his wife had been. The surgeons refused the case and sent the man away to die. Indignant, the lawyer sought the superintendent of the hospital.

“‘Why won’t you take my friend’s case?’

“‘It is inoperable.’

“‘Isn’t it cancer of the stomach, like my wife’s?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘You cured my wife. Why can’t you cure my friend?’

“The official shook his head.

“I want an answer,” insisted the lawyer.

“‘Well, frankly,’ said the other, ‘your wife’s physician knew his business. Your friend’s physician is a fool. He has killed his patient by delay.’

“Back home went the lawyer, and spread that story quietly. To-day the specialist’s practice is almost ruined; but he has learned an expensive lesson. The moral is this: If your doctor is doubtful whether your trouble is cancerous, and advises delay, get another doctor.

“Then, there is the ‘conservative’ type of practitioner, who is timid about making a complete job of his operation. One of this kind had the case of an acquaintance of mine who was stricken with cancer of the breast. The physician, under persuasion of his patient, I presume, advised excising only the tumor itself, but the husband, who had been reading up on cancer, insisted on a radical operation. The entire breast was removed. A year later the woman’s unmarried sister was afflicted in exactly the same way; but the discovery was made earlier, so that the case was a distinctly favorable one. The girl, however, would not consent to the radical operation, and the physician (the same man) declared it unnecessary. The tumor alone was cut out. The cancer reappeared and another operation was necessary. The girl died after cruel suffering. The married sister is alive, and, five years after the operation, as sound as a bell. That physician is a wiser man; also a sadder one. There’s a special moral to this, too: the operator has but one chance; he must do his work thoroughly, or he might better not do it at all. When cancer returns after operation—which means that the roots were not eradicated—it is invariably fatal.

“Here are a few things which I want every one of you to remember. Had I had time I’d have had them printed for each of you to take home, so important do I think them:—

“No cancer is hopeless when discovered early.

“Most cancer, discovered early, is permanently curable.

“The only cure is the knife.

“Medicines are worse than useless.

“Delay is more than dangerous; it is deadly.

“The one hope, and a strong one, is prompt and radical operation. A half-operation is worse than none at all.

“Most, if not all, cancer is preventable by correcting the minor difficulty from which it develops.

“With recognition of, and prompt action upon early symptoms, the death rate can be cut down at least a half; probably more.

“The fatalism which says: ‘If it’s cancer, I might as well give up,’ is foolish, cowardly, and suicidal.

“And, finally, here is some simple advice, intelligible to any thinking human being, which has been indorsed in printed form by the Congress of Surgeons of North America:—

“‘Be careful of persistent sores or irritations, external or internal.

“‘Be careful of yourself, without undue worry. At the first suspicious symptom go to some good physician and demand the truth. Don’t wait for pain to develop.

“‘If the doctor suspects cancer insist that he confirm or disprove his suspicions.

“‘Don’t be a hopeless fatalist. If it’s cancer face it bravely. With courage and prompt action the chances of recovery are all in your favor.

“‘Don’t defer an advised operation even for a day; and don’t shrink from the merciful knife, when the alternative is the merciless anguish of slow death.’

“For the woman who fears the knife, Dr. Charles H. Mayo, one of the greatest of living surgeons, has spoken the final words: ‘The risk is not in surgery, but in _delayed surgery_.’

“I have said my say, ladies, and there are five minutes left. Has any one any further questions?”

There was none. But as he stepped down, Mrs. Sharpless whispered to him: “I watched them while you talked, and half of those women are thinking, and thinking _hard_.”

Six months thereafter, Mrs. Clyde came into the Health Master’s office one day.

“I’ve just come from a sort of experience meeting of the Mothers’ Club,” she said.

“What was the topic this time?” asked Dr. Strong.

“Aftermath.”

“Of what?”

“Your cancer talk.”

“Anything definite?”

“Definite, indeed! Between fifteen and twenty of the members went away from that meeting where you talked, suspecting themselves of cancer.”

“That’s too many.”

“Yes. Ten of them had their fears set at rest right away.”

“I’m sorry to have frightened them; but one has to do a little harm in aiming at almost any good.”

“This was worth it. Half a dozen others had minor operations.”

“Perhaps saving major ones later.”

“Very likely. And four of them actually had cancer. Three out of the four are going to be well women. The fourth has an even chance. Dr. Strong, I don’t think you’ve done so good a day’s work since you brought health into this house.”

“I thank you,” said the doctor simply; “I think you are right. And you’ve given me the most profound and about the rarest satisfaction with which the physician is ever rewarded.”

“And that is?” she asked.

“The practical certainty of having definitely saved human life,” said the Health Master.

IX. THE GOOD GRAY DOCTOR

A twenty-dollar bill! Crisp, fresh, and golden, it rose monumentally from the basis of nickels, dimes, and quarters which made up the customary collection of the Bairdstown Memorial Church. Even the generosity of the Clyde family, who, whenever they spent a week-end at Mr. Clyde’s farm outside the little city, attended the Sunday services, looked meager and insignificant beside its yellow-backed splendor. Deacon Wilkes, passing the plate, gazed at it in fascination. Subsequent contributors surreptitiously touched it in depositing their own modest offerings, as if to make certain of its substance. It was even said at the Wednesday Sewing Circle that the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, from his eminence in the pulpit, had marked its colorful glint with an instant and benign eye and had changed the final hymn to one which specially celebrated the glory of giving.

In the Clyde pew also there was one who specially noted the donor, but with an expression far from benign. Dr. Strong’s appraising glance ranged over the plump and glossy perfection of the stranger, his symphonic grayness, beginning at his gray-suède-shod feet, one of which unobtrusively protruded into the aisle, verging upward through gray sock and trouser to gray frock coat, generously cut, and terminating at the sleek gray head. Even the tall hat which the man dandled on his knees was gray. Against this Quakerish color-scheme the wearer’s face stood out, large, pink, and heavy-jowled, lighted by restless brown eyes. His manner was at once important and reverent, and his “amen” a masterpiece of unction. No such impressive outlander had visited Bairdstown for many a moon.

After the service the visitor went forward to speak with Mr. Huddleston. At the same time Dr. Strong strolled up the aisle and contrived to pass the two so, as to obtain a face-to-face view of the stranger.

“At nine o’clock to-morrow, then, and I shall be delighted to see you,” the pastor was saying as Dr. Strong passed.

“Good-morning, Professor,” said Dr. Strong, with an accent on the final word as slight as the nod which accompanied it.

“Good-morning! Good-morning!” returned the other heartily. But his glance, as it followed the man who had accosted him, was puzzled and not wholly untroubled.

“Who is your munificent friend?” asked Mrs. Clyde, as the Health Master emerged from the church and joined her husband and herself in their car.

“When I last ran across him he called himself Professor Graham Gray, the Great Gray Benefactor,” replied Dr. Strong.

“Dresses the part, doesn’t he?” observed Mr. Clyde. “Where was it that you knew him?”

“On the Pacific Coast, five years ago. He was then ‘itinerating’—the quack term for traveling from place to place, picking up such practice as may be had by flamboyant advertising. Itinerating in eyes, as he would probably put it.”

“A wandering quack oculist?”

“Optician, rather, since he carried his own stock of glasses. In fact that’s where his profit came in. He advertised treatment free and charged two or three dollars for the glasses, special rates to schoolchildren. The scheme is an old one and a devilish. Half of the children in San Luis Obispo County, where I chanced upon his trail, were wearing his vision-twisters by the time he was through with them.”

“What kind of glasses were they?”

“Sometimes magnifying lenses. Mostly just plain window glass. Few children escaped him, for he would tell the parents that only prompt action could avert blindness.”

“At least the plain glass couldn’t hurt the children,” suggested Mrs. Clyde.

“Couldn’t it! It couldn’t fail to hurt them. Modify the sight of a delicate instrument like a child’s eye continuously by the most transparent of barriers, and it is bound to go wrong soon. The magnifying glasses are far worse. There are hundreds of children in that one locality alone who will carry the stigma of his quackery throughout their lives.”

“Do you think he is here with a view to practicing his amiable trade?” inquired Clyde.

“Only in part, if at all. I understand that he has changed his line.”

“How comes he by all that showy money, then?”

“By murder.”

The Clydes, accustomed to their physician’s hammerstroke turns of speech, took this under consideration.

“But he wasn’t committing murder in the church just now, I suppose,” insinuated Mrs. Clyde at length.

“Not directly. His immediate business there, I suspect, was bribery.”

“Of whom?”

“The minister.”

“Oh, come, Strong!” protested Mr. Clyde. “Mr. Huddleston isn’t an intellectual giant, I grant you; but he’s certainly a well-meaning and honorable old fellow.”

“Some cynical philosopher has remarked that wicked men have a talent for doing harm, but fools have a genius. Mr. Huddleston’s goodness and honesty, taken in connection with his hopeless ignorance of human nature, are just so much capital to hand for a scoundrel like this Gray.”

“What does he expect to get for his twenty-dol-lar bill?”

“First, a reputation for piety and generosity. Second, that reputation duly certified to by the leading minister of the town.”

“In other words, a testimonial.”

“Precisely. For home use, and cheap at twenty dollars. Preparatory to operating in a town, your itinerating quack bribes two people—if he can. First, the editor of the local paper; second, the pastor of the leading church. The editor usually takes the money with his eyes wide open; the minister with his eyes tight shut.”

“How can his eyes be shut to such a business?” asked Mrs. Clyde.

“Because so much dust has been thrown in them by the so-called religious journals.”

“Surely you don’t mean that religious journals exploit quackery in their pages!” cried Mrs. Clyde.

“They are the mainstay of the quack and patent medicine business,” declared the Health Master. “Leaving out the Christian Science papers, which, of course, don’t touch this dirty money, the religious press of all denominations, with a few honorable individual exceptions, sells out to any form of medical fraud which has a dollar to spend. Is it strange that the judgment of some of the clergy, who implicitly trust in their sectarian publications, becomes distorted? It’s an even chance that our Great Gray faker’s advertisement is in the religious weekly which lies on Mr. Huddleston’s study-table at this moment.”

Grandma Sharpless turned around from her seat in front, where she always ensconced herself so that, as she put it, she could see what was coming in time to jump. “I know it is,” she stated quietly. “For while I was waiting in the parsonage last week I picked up the ‘Church Pillar’ and saw it there.”

“Trust Grandma Sharpless’s eyes not to miss anything that comes within their range,” said Dr. Strong.

“Well, I missed the sense of that advertisement till just now,” retorted the old lady. “I’ve just remembered about this Graham Gray.”

“What about him?” asked the Health Master with eagerness, for Mrs. Sharpless’s memory was as reliable for retaining salient facts as her vision was for discerning them. “Do you know him?”

“Only by his works. Last year a traveling doctor of that name stopped over at Greenvale, twenty miles down the river, and gave some of his lectures to Suffering Womanhood, or some such folderol. He got hold of Sally Griffin, niece of our farmer here, while she was visiting there. Sally’s as sound as a pippin, except for an occasional spell of fool-in-the-head, and I guess no school of doctoring ever helps that common ailment much. Well, this Gray got her scared out of her wits with symptoms, and sold her twenty-five dollars’ worth of medicine to cure her of something or other she didn’t have. Cured!” sniffed the lively narrator. “If I hadn’t taken the stuff away from her and locked it up, I expect she’d be in the churchyard by now.”

“The whole philosophy of quackery explicated and punctured, by one who knows,” chuckled Dr. Strong.

“None of your palaver with me, young man!” returned the brisk old lady, who was devoted to the Health Master, and showed it by a policy of determined opposition of the letter and whole-hearted support of the spirit and deed, in all things. “Probably he knows as much as most of your regular doctors, at that!”

“At least he seems to know human nature. That’s the strong point of the charlatan. But have you got any of his medicine left?”

“Yes; I think I can lay my hands on what’s left of it. I remember that Sally boohooed like a baby, grown woman that she is, when I took it away from her.” Dr. Strong’s eyebrows went up sharply. “As soon as we get to the house I’ll look it up.”

On their arrival at the roomy old farmstead which Mr. Clyde had remodeled and modernized for what he called “an occasional three days of grace” from his business in the city of Worthington, Grandma Sharpless set about the search, and presently came to the living-room bearing in one hand a large bottle and in the other a newspaper.

“Since you’re interested in Professor Gray,” she said, “here’s what he says about himself in yesterday’s ‘Bairdstown Bugle.’ I do think,” she added, “that the Honorable Silas Harris might be in better business with his paper than publishing such truck as this. Listen to it.”

GOSPEL HERBS WILL CURE YOUR ILLS

Women of Bairdstown; Read your Bible! Revelation 22d chapter, 2d verse. God promises that “the Herbs of the field shall heal the nations.” In a vision from above, the holy secret has been revealed to me. Alone of all men, I can brew this miracle-working elixir.

“The blasphemous old slinkum!” Grandma Sharpless interrupted herself to say angrily. “He doesn’t even quote the Scriptures right!”

“Oh, blasphemy is a small matter for a rascal of his kind,” said the Health Master lightly. “Go on.”

She read on:—

Come to me, ye women who suffer, and I will give you relief. All those wasting and wearing ailments from which the tender sex suffers, vanish like mist before the healing, revivifying influence of Gospel Herbs. Supposed incurable diseases: Rheumatism, Dropsy, Diabetes and all kidney ills, Stomach Trouble, Scrofula, Blood Poison, even the dreaded scourge, Consumption, yield at once to this remedy. Though my special message is to women, I will not withhold this boon from any suffering human. Come one and all, rich and poor, young and old, of either sex. Your money refunded if I do not cure you. Public meeting Monday and Tuesday evenings, at eight o’clock sharp in the Scatcherd Opera House; admission free to all. Private consultation at the Mallory Hotel, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Remember, I cure where the doctors fail; or no pay.

Prof. Graham Gray, The Great Gray Benefactor.

Mrs. Sharpless held out for the general view the advertisement, which occupied, in huge type, two thirds of a page of the “Bugle.” The remainder of the page was taken up with testimonials to the marvelous effects of the Gospel Herbs. Most of the letters were from far-away towns, but there were a few from the general vicinity of Bairdsville.

Meantime Dr. Strong had been delicately tasting and smelling the contents of the bottle, which were thick and reddish.

“What do you make out is in it?” asked Clyde.

“Death—and a few worse things. Grandma Sharpless, you say that the girl cried for this after you took it from her?”

“Not only that; she wrote to the Professor for more. And when it came I smashed the bottle.”

“You ought to have the honorary degree of M.D. Well, it’s pretty plain, but to make sure I’ll send this to Worthington for an analysis.”

“So our friend, the gray wolf, is going to prowl in Bairdstown for the next three days!” Thomas Clyde began to rub his chin softly; then not so softly; and presently quite hard. His wife watched him with troubled eyes. When his hand came down to rest upon his knee, it was doubled into a very competent-looking fist. His face set in the expression which the newspapers of his own city had dubbed, after the tenement campaign of the year before, “Clyde’s fighting smile.”

“Oh, Tom!” broke out his wife, “what kind of trouble are you going to get into now?”

“Trouble?” repeated the head of the family, in well-simulated surprise. “Why, dear, I wasn’t even thinking of trouble—for myself. But I believe it is time for a little action. Let’s call this a household meeting” (this was one of the established methods of the Clyde clan) “and find out. As it isn’t a family affair, we won’t call in the children this time. Strong, what, if anything, are we going to do about this stranger in our midst? Are we going to let him take us in?”

“The question is,” said Dr. Strong quickly, “whether the Clyde family is willing to loan its subsidized physician temporarily to the city of Bairdstown.”

“On the Chinese plan,” supplemented Clyde.

“Certainly. On the Chinese plan of trying to save the community from a visitation instead of waiting to cure them of the incurable results of it.”

“By visitation I suppose you mean Professor Gray?” said Mrs. Sharpless.

“Exactly. I should rank him rather higher than an epidemic of scarlet fever, as an ally of damage and death.”

“I’ll vote ‘Yes,’” said Mrs. Clyde rather plaintively. “Only, I wish you two men didn’t have so much Irish in your temperament.”

“I scorn your insinuation,” replied her husband. “I’m the original dove of peace, but this Gray person ruffles my plumage. What do you say, Grandma?”

“Bairdstown is my own place, partly. I know the people and they know me and I won’t sit quiet and see ‘em put upon. I vote ‘Yes.’”

“Make it unanimous!” said Clyde. “What’s the first move of the army of relief? I’m in on this somewhere, Strong.”

“Contribute your car for a couple of days, then, and we’ll go out on a still hunt for the elusive clue and the shy and retiring evidence. In other words, we’ll scour the county, and look up some of these local testimonials which the Great Gray One gathered in last year, and now prints in the ‘Bugle.’”

“And I’ll stop in town and see Mr. Huddleston to-morrow,” said Mrs. Sharpless.

“You won’t get any results,” prophesied the Health Master. “But, anyway, get him to come to the Gray lecture on Tuesday evening. We’ll need him.”

During the ensuing two and a half days and two nights Mrs. Clyde had speech of her husband but once; and that was at 2 a.m. when he woke her up to tell her that he was having the time of his life, and she replied by asking him whether he had let the cat in, and returned to her dreams.

Bairdstown’s Suffering Womanhood—as per advertisement—turned out extensively and self-commiseratingly to the free lecture of Tuesday evening, bringing with them a considerable admixture of the male populace, curious, cynical, or expectant. On the platform sat a number of “special guests,” including the Rev. Mr. Huddleston, mild of face and white of hair, and the Honorable Silas Harris, owner of the “Bugle.”

“Cured” patients, to the number of half a dozen, fidgeted in the seats of honor with expressions of conscious and pleasurable importance.

“They appear to be enjoying poor health quite literally,” whispered Clyde to Dr. Strong, as the two, begrimed with the dust of a long day’s travel just finished, slipped quietly into side seats.